...not sure of the appropriateness of this here, but I felt I should recommend this for-fee service to those who place importance upon current awareness but are overwhelmed by the number and variety of news sources on-line. I guess I should state up front that I have nothing to do with Silobreaker, other than being a user. It was orginally recommended to me by a contact at Jane's. The service has a seven day free trial, and I was hooked. I feel its a tremendous OSINT resource and highly recommend it to others.

Silobreaker (http://www.silobreaker.com/corporate/)

Jedburgh

01-05-2007, 09:02 PM

Move over Silobreaker - I just found a resource that does just about the same thing, but it is completely FREE. Funny thing, the site is run by the EU...

Perhaps the free EU service is stirring up some competition. I'm going to be trying this new beta version out side by side with the EMM News Explorer and see if its offers any real value beyond that available to anyone with an internet connection. As I said earlier in this thread, the free EU service gives you everything that the current premium Silobreaker service does - so why pay?

As you may have heard, Silobreaker is going through a major overhaul based on new ideas, improvement of old ones and, most importantly, feedback from old and new users.

We are now showcasing the new version openly during a beta period and are especially interested in hearing back from you who have shown interest in Silobreaker in the past to find out what you think. Your feedback will help us put finishing touches to the service before a general beta-release.

At the moment anyone can access the new beta version, but the plan is to switch to a “Freemium” structure at the end of the beta period. We will then offer a free version and one or two premium versions (partitioning and pricing yet to be determined). The current Silobreaker service will continue to run in parallel to the new beta version until we make the transition more officially.

The new beta version can be found at http://beta.silobreaker.com . You can either use the open version or register to access personalization options and the full archive of documents.

Your comments, ideas, suggestions or any other feedback will be very much appreciated. We are particularly interested in your views on usability and what you might feel is missing either regarding content, functionality or in comparison with the “old” version.

Please bear with us with various development and performance issues as the new beta version is still “work in progress”. It is optimized for the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox, but should work fine with earlier versions too.

Some of the bigger changes include:

1. Completely new and simplified user interface for a more “Web 2.0” experience.
2. Introduction of Silobreaker Filter – a new powerful “search within search” tool.
3. Personalization features. Drag and drop to design your own pages - and Filter to create Custom Views of content about your interests.
4. Introduction of new content types (Blogs, Reports, Audio/Video)
5. Introduction of Science & Technology and a more in-depth Business focus.
6. RSS-links and alerts
7. “Request a Source” and other user interactive features
8. Advanced Search features
9. Considerably more content across all content types

At the moment these features are implemented to varying degrees but will gradually be completed over the short term.

We think you will find that the strength of Silobreaker’s unique combination of both analytics and content becomes even clearer in the new beta version. Fastest time to context remains Silobreaker’s main value proposition.

To let us know what you think, please use the Give Feedback form, available on the beta web site...

This paper presents a real-time news event extraction system developed by the Joint Research Centre (http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/jrc/index.cfm) of the European Commission. It is capable of accurately and efficiently extracting violent and natural disaster events from online news without using much linguistic sophistication. In particular, in our linguistically relatively lightweight approach to event extraction clustered news have been heavily exploited at various stages of processing. The systems’ architecture, automatic pattern learning, our new pattern specification language, and information aggregation techniques are briefly described in this paper. Next, the issues of integrating event information in a global monitoring systems are addressed too. Finally, the results of accuracy evaluation are presented.